r/books • u/cupidswing • 18h ago
I DNF’d Pachinko
So when I purchased this, I had expected to read a book following a woman who is now thrown into the wolves and is forced to make hard choices in order to survive and while in a sense we do get that. It falls short for me in the lack of time we really spend with the characters.
The issue I’ve had is that the book essentially speed runs Sunja (the main character) life, that we don’t really get to know her as a person. The only thing we’re given is how Sunja put into terrible scenarios and how she handles it. But do we know if she’s funny? If she’s quick-tempered, I sure don’t know anything other than she’s resilient which is great but where’s the meat of her character. How does her relationships with the other characters develop? Just by time lapse?
We don’t even get to see how characters handle the aftermath of said scenarios, we’re just thrusted a year or two or maybe three later in the timeline, to deal with the next scenario. Then we’re mainly following other characters now and it’s like well damn, what happened to Sunja?
There was a moment where I teared up in the book and I do relate to some of the struggles that Sunja’s family goes through, so with anyone who’s an immigrant or is a first generation immigrant, you may like this. But for me, i wasn’t able to connect to the characters.
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u/SUMMONAH 17h ago
Yeah I think it was intentional to demonstrate the korean mentality of just enduring hardship one after the other. I’ve seen it in my own parents generation. Just survival rather than thriving. If you’re only in constant survival mode, when do you have time to be funny? Creative? Artistic? Korea is also collectivist so it makes sense to focus on generational story telling as opposed to following one persons journey.
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u/IGiveBagAdvice 18h ago
I actually really liked the way we were in fast forward and didn’t get anything but the grit she has.
I think I perceived this as a reflection of her own attitude towards herself. It also really embodies something a boss told me while I was in Korea which is “the Korean motto is endure endure endure” and you can get through it.
I don’t know if I would feel the same way reading now but certainly when I did read it that’s what came to mind.
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u/littlecowbaby 17h ago
Pachinko is one of my favorite books ever<3. If you’re expecting it to be about just one person, you’ll be disappointed. All of the characters are apart of a family, and they all come and go in the story. Sometimes you need to wait for the payoff from certain parts. It’s what makes the book so special <3
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u/iabyajyiv 17h ago
Sounds like you went into the book with the wrong expectation. It was never only Sunja's story, even though hers was the most interesting.
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u/rainysky33 17h ago
I felt this too, that the book is not character driven enough and doesn’t show enough of Sunja’s inner conflicts or thoughts. But I’m a third gen immigrant and I see my grandparents in her a bit. At that point in their lives, it really was all about survival. Not much opportunity for individualism. So I saw why it was written like that
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u/Hrududu147 17h ago
That’s exactly how I felt. Every single big event that should have a big fallout was immediately followed by a time skip.
Strangely, I loved the Apple TV adaptation. Though that looks like it’s quietly not coming back.
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u/bobo1899 16h ago
How much of the book did it cover? I’ve been meaning to watch it, that’s a shame if they don’t finish the story in its entirety.
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u/Hrududu147 14h ago
Maybe about 2/3. They padded out Solomon’s story to give it almost equal time to Sunjas story. But the last series ends with Noa finding out the big secret. I think one more season would have finished it out.
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u/SUMMONAH 16h ago
I think the author doesn’t endorse the AppleTV version iirc
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u/EntireEgg978 18h ago
I wanted to like it so much but it felt like reading a Wikipedia summary of someone's life instead of actually living it with them.
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u/sweet_tea013 15h ago
What helped me understand the pacing was the author explanation on her motivations to write this story. It's actually a recollection of dozen and dozen of testimonials from korean people exiled in Japan. Once I got that, I realized why some storylines seem "unfinished" and it really helped me appreciate it.
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u/Neina_Ixion 15h ago
I DNF-ed it as well. The characters were given too little time for my preference as well. I also picked this up when everyone was recommending "A Little Life" and both authors' decisions to put the characters in the worst situations possible felt manipulative rather than enlightening to me.
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u/WillIEatTheFruit 3h ago
Pachinko was based on real interviews so I think it was more trying to cram in a lot of different people’s real experiences into one story which I can see coming across as overly negative. I haven’t read it but A Little Life seems to be written intentionally misanthropic in comparison.
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u/The_Chums_of_Chance 16h ago
I quite enjoyed the book, although I did get a little sense of, “Oh, I really like this character, I wonder - oh, yes, they’ve died in the way that is worst for them and others.” Which felt like it happened…a lot.
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u/AdminsLoveGenocide 16h ago
I think you do get to know her, its just that she is heavily focussed on fulfilling her basic needs and that is part of her character.
Subsequent generations get different characters which I felt was appropriate with their circumstances.
Personally I felt it was a little repetitive given how long it is but I thought the events near the end of the book were powerful and there was a good payoff there.
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u/123hop 15h ago
I point to this book as the pinnacle of the Book Club Book Misery Index, my made-up scale for the many best seller-type books that are popular with book clubs (including mine) which seem to me mostly created to see how much suffering characters can be made to endure. I don't know if you got this far, but when it gets to the 1980s and a character gets AIDS I laughed out loud - there was a brand new form of suffering, so someone in the book had to experience it! Not really the same as your complaint, but if it wasn't a selection for my book club I probably would have DNFed it too.
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u/cupidswing 13h ago
I didn’t get to that part, but I chucked at that comment. At some point some books get to threading “misery porn” waters
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u/SpecialTumbleweed183 2h ago
Watch the show, it does an amazing job at fleshing out the characters and the world. Gorgeously shot too.
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u/Hinoto-no-Ryuji 15h ago
It gets better about this in the back third (I gave it 3.5 overall), but I too disliked how distant its prose was for much of the book. It wasn’t even just Sunja; so much of the writing is so blandly expository for so long that I felt it mostly fails to do its setting and premise justice. If it was a deliberate stylistic choice, I think it ultimately wasn’t one that was executed with the craft required to make it work.
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u/ruby_blossom_veil 39m ago
the structural empathy gap is unforgivable. We are forced to watch people survive without ever seeing them live
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u/playful--cloud 18h ago
to each their own, it’s one of my favorite books of all time. i really liked the pacing and the way it was written, you say we don’t get to see how characters handle aftermath of each scenario, but each time the narrative jumps either further in time or to another character, there are always subtle references to and hints about what happened in between. not everybody likes that style of writing.
by the way the book absolutely comes full circle with sunja’s story if you decide to finish it. once you start branching off to other characters you still come back around to sunja, she is still the main character.